OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Private Information Retrieval Schemes with Regenerating Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

A private information retrieval (PIR) scheme allows a user to retrieve a file from a database without revealing any information on the file being requested. As of now, PIR schemes have been proposed for several kinds of storage systems, including replicated and MDS-coded data. In this paper, the problem of constructing a PIR scheme on regenerating codes is considered. A regenerating code is a storage code whose codewords are distributed among $n$ nodes, enabling efficient storage of files, as well as low-bandwidth retrieval of files and repair of nodes. In this work, a PIR scheme on regenerating codes is constructed, using the product-matrix (PM) framework of Rashmi, Shah and Kumar. Both the minimum-bandwidth (MBR) and minimum-storage (MSR) settings are considered, and the structure given by the PM framework is used in order to reduce the download communication complexity of our schemes.
User Fairness Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) for 5G Millimeter-Wave Communications with Analog Beamforming
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

The integration of non-orthogonal multiple access in millimeter-Wave communications (mmWave-NOMA) can significantly improve the spectrum efficiency and increase the number of users in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication. In this paper we consider a downlink mmWave-NOMA cellular system, where the base station is mounted with an analog beamforming phased array, and multiple users are served in the same time-frequency resource block. To guarantee user fairness, we formulate a joint beamforming and power allocation problem to maximize the minimal achievable rate among the users, i.e., we adopt the max-min fairness. As the problem is difficult to solve due to the non-convex formulation and high dimension of the optimization variables, we propose a sub-optimal solution, which makes use of the spatial sparsity in the angle domain of the mmWave channel. In the solution, the closed-form optimal power allocation is obtained first, which reduces the joint optimization problem into an equivalent beamforming problem. Then an appropriate beamforming vector is designed. Simulation results show that the proposed solution can achieve a near-upper-bound performance in terms of achievable rate, which is significantly better than that of the conventional mmWave orthogonal multiple access (mmWave-OMA) system.
SurReal: enhancing Surgical simulation Realism using style transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Surgical simulation is an increasingly important element of surgical education. Using simulation can be a means to address some of the significant challenges in developing surgical skills with limited time and resources. The photo-realistic fidelity of simulations is a key feature that can improve the experience and transfer ratio of trainees. In this paper, we demonstrate how we can enhance the visual fidelity of existing surgical simulation by performing style transfer of multi-class labels from real surgical video onto synthetic content. We demonstrate our approach on simulations of cataract surgery using real data labels from an existing public dataset. Our results highlight the feasibility of the approach and also the powerful possibility to extend this technique to incorporate additional temporal constraints and to different applications.
Uploading Brain into Computer: Whom to Upload First?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

The final goal of the intelligence augmentation process is a complete merger of biological brains and computers allowing for integration and mutual enhancement between computer's speed and memory and human's intelligence. This process, known as uploading, analyzes human brain in detail sufficient to understand its working patterns and makes it possible to simulate said brain on a computer. As it is likely that such simulations would quickly evolve or be modified to achieve superintelligence it is very important to make sure that the first brain chosen for such a procedure is a suitable one. In this paper, we attempt to answer the question: Whom to upload first?
Scale-free collaboration networks: An author name disambiguation perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2018
Year: 2018

Several studies have found that collaboration networks are scale-free, proposing that such networks can be modeled by specific network evolution mechanisms like preferential attachment. This study argues that collaboration networks can look more or less scale-free depending on the methods for resolving author name ambiguity in bibliographic data. Analyzing networks constructed from multiple datasets containing 3.4M ~ 9.6M publication records, this study shows that collaboration networks in which author names are disambiguated by the commonly used heuristic, i.e., forename-initial-based name matching, tend to produce degree distributions better fitted to power-law slopes with the typical scaling parameter (2 < α < 3) than networks disambiguated by more accurate algorithm-based methods. Such tendency is observed across collaboration networks generated under various conditions such as cumulative years, 5- & 1-year sliding windows, and random sampling, and through simulation, found to arise due mainly to artefactual entities created by inaccurate disambiguation. This cautionary study calls for special attention from scholars analyzing network data in which entities such as people, organization, and gene can be merged or split by improper disambiguation.
IMS at the PolEval 2018: A Bulky Ensemble Depedency Parser meets 12 Simple Rules for Predicting Enhanced Dependencies in Polish
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents the IMS contribution to the PolEval 2018 Shared Task. We submitted systems for both of the Subtasks of Task 1. In Subtask (A), which was about dependency parsing, we used our ensemble system from the CoNLL 2017 UD Shared Task. The system first preprocesses the sentences with a CRF POS/morphological tagger and predicts supertags with a neural tagger. Then, it employs multiple instances of three different parsers and merges their outputs by applying blending. The system achieved the second place out of four participating teams. In this paper we show which components of the system were the most responsible for its final performance. The goal of Subtask (B) was to predict enhanced graphs. Our approach consisted of two steps: parsing the sentences with our ensemble system from Subtask (A), and applying 12 simple rules to obtain the final dependency graphs. The rules introduce additional enhanced arcs only for tokens with "conj" heads (conjuncts). They do not predict semantic relations at all. The system ranked first out of three participating teams. In this paper we show examples of rules we designed and analyze the relation between the quality of automatically parsed trees and the accuracy of the enhanced graphs.
ColorUNet: A convolutional classification approach to colorization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper tackles the challenge of colorizing grayscale images. We take a deep convolutional neural network approach, and choose to take the angle of classification, working on a finite set of possible colors. Similarly to a recent paper, we implement a loss and a prediction function that favor realistic, colorful images rather than "true" ones. We show that a rather lightweight architecture inspired by the U-Net, and trained on a reasonable amount of pictures of landscapes, achieves satisfactory results on this specific subset of pictures. We show that data augmentation significantly improves the performance and robustness of the model, and provide visual analysis of the prediction confidence. We show an application of our model, extending the task to video colorization. We suggest a way to smooth color predictions across frames, without the need to train a recurrent network designed for sequential inputs.
Offline Behaviors of Online Friends
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

In this work we analyze traces of mobility and co-location among a group of nearly 1000 closely interacting individuals. We attempt to reconstruct the Facebook friendship graph, Facebook interaction network, as well as call and SMS networks from longitudinal records of person-to-person offline proximity. We find subtle, yet observable behavioral differences between pairs of people who communicate using each of the different channels and we show that the signal of friendship is strong enough to stand out from the noise of random and schedule-driven offline interactions between familiar strangers. Our study also provides an overview of methods for link inference based on offline behavior and proposes new features to improve the performance of the prediction task.
SRP: Efficient class-aware embedding learning for large-scale data via supervised random projections
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Supervised dimensionality reduction strategies have been of great interest. However, current supervised dimensionality reduction approaches are difficult to scale for situations characterized by large datasets given the high computational complexities associated with such methods. While stochastic approximation strategies have been explored for unsupervised dimensionality reduction to tackle this challenge, such approaches are not well-suited for accelerating computational speed for supervised dimensionality reduction. Motivated to tackle this challenge, in this study we explore a novel direction of directly learning optimal class-aware embeddings in a supervised manner via the notion of supervised random projections (SRP). The key idea behind SRP is that, rather than performing spectral decomposition (or approximations thereof) which are computationally prohibitive for large-scale data, we instead perform a direct decomposition by leveraging kernel approximation theory and the symmetry of the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) measure of dependence between the embedded data and the labels. Experimental results on five different synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed SRP strategy for class-aware embedding learning can be very promising in producing embeddings that are highly competitive with existing supervised dimensionality reduction methods (e.g., SPCA and KSPCA) while achieving 1-2 orders of magnitude better computational performance. As such, such an efficient approach to learning embeddings for dimensionality reduction can be a powerful tool for large-scale data analysis and visualization.
BPDS: A Blockchain based Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing for Electronic Medical Records
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Electronic medical record (EMR) is a crucial form of healthcare data, currently drawing a lot of attention. Sharing health data is considered to be a critical approach to improve the quality of healthcare service and reduce medical costs. However, EMRs are fragmented across decentralized hospitals, which hinders data sharing and puts patients' privacy at risks. To address these issues, we propose a blockchain based privacy-preserving data sharing for EMRs, called BPDS. In BPDS, the original EMRs are stored securely in the cloud and the indexes are reserved in a tamper-proof consortium blockchain. By this means, the risk of the medical data leakage could be greatly reduced, and at the same time, the indexes in blockchain ensure that the EMRs can not be modified arbitrarily. Secure data sharing can be accomplished automatically according to the predefined access permissions of patients through the smart contracts of blockchain. Besides, the joint-design of the CP-ABE-based access control mechanism and the content extraction signature scheme provides strong privacy preservation in data sharing. Security analysis shows that BPDS is a secure and effective way to realize data sharing for EMRs.
Evaluating the Complementarity of Taxonomic Relation Extraction Methods Across Different Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Modern information systems are changing the idea of "data processing" to the idea of "concept processing", meaning that instead of processing words, such systems process semantic concepts which carry meaning and share contexts with other concepts. Ontology is commonly used as a structure that captures the knowledge about a certain area via providing concepts and relations between them. Traditionally, concept hierarchies have been built manually by knowledge engineers or domain experts. However, the manual construction of a concept hierarchy suffers from several limitations such as its coverage and the enormous costs of its extension and maintenance. Ontology learning, usually referred to the (semi-)automatic support in ontology development, is usually divided into steps, going from concepts identification, passing through hierarchy and non-hierarchy relations detection and, seldom, axiom extraction. It is reasonable to say that among these steps the current frontier is in the establishment of concept hierarchies, since this is the backbone of ontologies and, therefore, a good concept hierarchy is already a valuable resource for many ontology applications. The automatic construction of concept hierarchies from texts is a complex task and much work have been proposing approaches to better extract relations between concepts. These different proposals have never been contrasted against each other on the same set of data and across different languages. Such comparison is important to see whether they are complementary or incremental. Also, we can see whether they present different tendencies towards recall and precision. This paper evaluates these different methods on the basis of hierarchy metrics such as density and depth, and evaluation metrics such as Recall and Precision. Results shed light over the comprehensive set of methods according to the literature in the area.
A Traceable Concurrent Data Anonymous Transmission Scheme for Heterogeneous VANETs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are attractive scenarios that can improve the traffic situation and provide convenient services for drivers and passengers via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. However, there are still many security challenges in the traffic information transmission, especially in the intense traffic case. For ensuring the privacy of users and traceability of vehicles, we propose a traceable concurrent data anonymous transmission scheme for heterogeneous VANETs. The scheme is based on certificateless aggregate signcryption, so it supports batch verification. Moreover, conditional anonymity is also achieved due to the involving of the pseudo-ID technique. Furthermore, it is a pairing-free scheme for the merit of multi-trapdoor hash functions. As a result, the total computation overhead is greatly reduced.
YODA: Enabling computationally intensive contracts on blockchains with Byzantine and Selfish nodes
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

One major shortcoming of permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is that they are unsuitable for running Computationally Intensive smart Contracts (CICs). This prevents such blockchains from running Machine Learning algorithms, Zero-Knowledge proofs, etc. which may need non-trivial computation. In this paper, we present YODA, which is to the best of our knowledge the first solution for efficient computation of CICs in permissionless blockchains with guarantees for a threat model with both Byzantine and selfish nodes. YODA selects one or more execution sets (ES) via Sortition to execute a particular CIC off-chain. One key innovation is the MultI-Round Adaptive Consensus using Likelihood Estimation (MIRACLE) algorithm based on sequential hypothesis testing. M I RACLE allows the execution sets to be small thus making YODA efficient while ensuring correct CIC execution with high probability. It adapts the number of ES sets automatically depending on the concentration of Byzantine nodes in the system and is optimal in terms of the expected number of ES sets used in certain scenarios. Through a suite of economic incentives and technical mechanisms such as the novel Randomness Inserted Contract Execution (RICE) algorithm, we force selfish nodes to behave honestly. We also prove that the honest behavior of selfish nodes is an approximate Nash Equilibrium. We present the system design and details of YODA and prove the security properties of MIRACLE and RICE. Our prototype implementation built on top of Ethereum demonstrates the ability of YODA to run CICs with orders of magnitude higher gas per unit time as well as total gas requirements than Ethereum currently supports. It also demonstrates the low overheads of RICE.
BAR: Bayesian Activity Recognition using variational inference
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Uncertainty estimation in deep neural networks is essential for designing reliable and robust AI systems. Applications such as video surveillance for identifying suspicious activities are designed with deep neural networks (DNNs), but DNNs do not provide uncertainty estimates. Capturing reliable uncertainty estimates in safety and security critical applications will help to establish trust in the AI system. Our contribution is to apply Bayesian deep learning framework to visual activity recognition application and quantify model uncertainty along with principled confidence. We utilize the stochastic variational inference technique while training the Bayesian DNNs to infer the approximate posterior distribution around model parameters and perform Monte Carlo sampling on the posterior of model parameters to obtain the predictive distribution. We show that the Bayesian inference applied to DNNs provide reliable confidence measures for visual activity recognition task as compared to conventional DNNs. We also show that our method improves the visual activity recognition precision-recall AUC by 6.2% compared to non-Bayesian baseline. We evaluate our models on Moments-In-Time (MiT) activity recognition dataset by selecting a subset of in- and out-of-distribution video samples.
Structured Turbo Compressed Sensing for Downlink Massive MIMO-OFDM Channel Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Compressed sensing has been employed to reduce the pilot overhead for channel estimation in wireless communication systems. Particularly, structured turbo compressed sensing (STCS) provides a generic framework for structured sparse signal recovery with reduced computational complexity and storage requirement. In this paper, we consider the problem of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) channel estimation in a frequency division duplexing (FDD) downlink system. By exploiting the structured sparsity in the angle-frequency domain (AFD) and angle-delay domain (ADD) of the massive MIMO-OFDM channel, we represent the channel by using AFD and ADD probability models and design message-passing based channel estimators under the STCS framework. Several STCS-based algorithms are proposed for massive MIMO-OFDM channel estimation by exploiting the structured sparsity. We show that, compared with other existing algorithms, the proposed algorithms have a much faster convergence speed and achieve competitive error performance under a wide range of simulation settings.
Fundamental Asymptotic Behavior of (Two-User) Distributed Massive MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

This paper considers the uplink of a distributed Massive MIMO network where $N$ base stations (BSs), each equipped with $M$ antennas, receive data from $K=2$ users. We study the asymptotic spectral efficiency (as $M\to \infty$) with spatial correlated channels, pilot contamination, and different degrees of channel state information (CSI) and statistical knowledge at the BSs. By considering a two-user setup, we can simply derive fundamental asymptotic behaviors and provide novel insights into the structure of the optimal combining schemes. In line with [1], when global CSI is available at all BSs, the optimal minimum-mean squared error combining has an unbounded capacity as $M\to \infty$, if the global channel covariance matrices of the users are asymptotically linearly independent. This result is instrumental to derive a suboptimal combining scheme that provides unbounded capacity as $M\to \infty$ using only local CSI and global channel statistics. The latter scheme is shown to outperform a generalized matched filter scheme, which also achieves asymptotic unbounded capacity by using only local CSI and global channel statistics, but is derived following [2] on the basis of a more conservative capacity bound.
Linear Memory Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Recurrent neural networks can learn complex transduction problems that require maintaining and actively exploiting a memory of their inputs. Such models traditionally consider memory and input-output functionalities indissolubly entangled. We introduce a novel recurrent architecture based on the conceptual separation between the functional input-output transformation and the memory mechanism, showing how they can be implemented through different neural components. By building on such conceptualization, we introduce the Linear Memory Network, a recurrent model comprising a feedforward neural network, realizing the non-linear functional transformation, and a linear autoencoder for sequences, implementing the memory component. The resulting architecture can be efficiently trained by building on closed-form solutions to linear optimization problems. Further, by exploiting equivalence results between feedforward and recurrent neural networks we devise a pretraining schema for the proposed architecture. Experiments on polyphonic music datasets show competitive results against gated recurrent networks and other state of the art models.
Activation Functions: Comparison of trends in Practice and Research for Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Deep neural networks have been successfully used in diverse emerging domains to solve real world complex problems with may more deep learning(DL) architectures, being developed to date. To achieve these state-of-the-art performances, the DL architectures use activation functions (AFs), to perform diverse computations between the hidden layers and the output layers of any given DL architecture. This paper presents a survey on the existing AFs used in deep learning applications and highlights the recent trends in the use of the activation functions for deep learning applications. The novelty of this paper is that it compiles majority of the AFs used in DL and outlines the current trends in the applications and usage of these functions in practical deep learning deployments against the state-of-the-art research results. This compilation will aid in making effective decisions in the choice of the most suitable and appropriate activation function for any given application, ready for deployment. This paper is timely because most research papers on AF highlights similar works and results while this paper will be the first, to compile the trends in AF applications in practice against the research results from literature, found in deep learning research to date.